Almost Perfect

Asher continues to give glimpses of a dog that may have issues with overarousal. Which is unexpected as he’s such a chill dog to live with at home. But that is a puppy that when he turns it on, he REALLY turns it on. Dialated pupils and frantic not thinking behavior. This week he got in big trouble (twice!) after getting too excited entering the arena with the other dogs and started biting heads – yeah, you don’t bite my Haku, buddy. And agility, just with the tiny bit we’ve done, really seems to spin him up quickly. Maybe it’s just a phase as he is, well, seven months old. We shall see. Asher is actually doing MOSTLY well at learning to wait his turn on the table while I work other dogs in agility – which, uh, may not be very calming overall, however.

It’s always interesting with a puppy, in hindsight it always seems obvious what you SHOULD have done as you trained them. But while you’re in the process and they’re still growing up, you can only have glimpses of the dog they will become. I’m on the fence at the moment that I think Asher is going to be fucking awesome in agility … or a trainwreck of knocked bars and overarousal and throwing his body around … or possibly neither. Only time will tell, but he’s definitely got …. potential. Potential for what, that’s the question. I love puppies and discovering who they are.

No big training goals with Asher at the moment. We have actually worked on our circle work, which he seems to have magically figured out how not to slam into the back of my legs. Still some issues getting him to come to the side of my body that I indicate though, he just gets fixated sometimes. He is … fast. And powerful. We shall see how that translates eventually.

We continue to work a lot on walking politely with me, especially with the whole group of dogs. He has gotten a lot better, we are now fixing him wanting to walk next me but curled around so I’m tripping on him – so, yeah, get back, dude. Also finally is catching a toy with a hug when you toss one to him – that was hard and requires a lot of core strength and coordination. Navarre, of course, totally wins at this behavior – he’s the cutest hugger.

Agility-wise we worked on Asher’s tunnel entrance problem, where he would choose whatever entry seemed most convenient. Now that he knows his threadle cue and understanding which side of the tunnel that means (well, the beginning stages of it), this week we went back to what ‘tunnel’ means, which means take the ‘obvious’ side even if the ‘non-obvious’ side is closer. It took a bit of work, but he LOVES his tunnels. Wraps continue to look very nice, I think he’s about ready to learn to threadle his wing wraps as well. That will give us a lot of skills to play with! We’re having a lot of fun together.

Asher did his first pinwheel this week, well, pinwheel of wings. And his first 16 inch table! We worked on adding distance and more opposite motion to his figure eights and he thought that was fun. Mostly we struggle with getting him to bring the damn toy to my hand when we use squeaky toys, which he loves. He will bring tug toys all the way into me no problem though (loves to SLAM into me to do that!). So that’s a mystery.

I’m estimating that he’s around 21 inches now, so he can stop growing. He continues to LOOK shorter than his local siblings, who seem more leggy. It could be an illusion, as I think he’s got more substance than them, but they LOOK taller. And, yes, that would make his sister over 21 inches! He is starting to look more and more like a dog, and I think sometimes even kind of handsome. I now think that he’s a lovely red color and never think about the color at all other than to think how adorable he is. He’s going to be big and beautiful – at least in my mind. His ears STILL can’t figure out what they want to do. They waffle from airplane to rose to forward drop aussie ears to often flipped completely backwards – no lack of character in those ears!

I really do adore that boy and I’m so glad that I got him. I’m probably a little too glowing, because it’s not like he doesn’t have issues. He has dug up and destroyed every bulb in the back yard, all my solar lights, chewed the cord to my outdoor lights, my hose sprayer and the wood molding on my covered porch. He regularly ‘prunes’ my trees and has starting digging holes as well. For whatever reason he started peeing on the rug in the middle of night, even though he almost NEVER had an accident before then – so he has to now sleep in a crate at night. There has been a re-emerging of body slamming the other dogs and his new face snapping/biting thing to other dogs when over aroused. He still body slams me like a 40 lb concrete brick, he really wants to be an alarm barker (not in my house!). I continue to have off and on loose stool issues with him, which I’m suspicious may because of digging up and eating crap he shouldn’t, or possibly because I keep trying to feed him more because he’s so freakin skinny. So maybe not TOTALLY perfect, but he’s pretty darn awesome anyway. And someday he’ll grow out of all that … hopefully.

Other dogs did work on some distance handling drills, we were rusty and Bright, OMG, just makes up the craziest stuff when she’s confused. So mostly worked with Navarre, who is all about going out away from me. Apparently no West Coast AKC Nationals for 2021, which was going to be our goal for 2020 to qualify for. There is USDAA Nationals in California, but there are so few local trials that I don’t see that happening. Apparently AKC may try a West Coast national again in 2022 (possibly Idaho?), but Bright will be almost 11 at that point, so I don’t know about doing a bunch of trailing with a 10 year old dog to get qualified. 2021 in Reno would have been perfect, but oh well. So no big agility goals once again in 2020, we barely competed this year, we’ll see what happens next year. By the end of year Asher may be ready to compete, and competing with a baby dog is FUN, as everything is a challenge!

Back to herding this week, because I wanted to make sure I was doing everything correctly, I had Ian work Asher. I’m happy to say that Asher actually works better for me, but was also happy to work for Ian without any signs of stress anymore. Pretty much Ian spent most of the time trying get Asher to stop in some fashion. Asher was super polite when he entered the arena and offered a down automatically, as he knows that’s what we do – but after that he was like, “We DON’T lie down and we DON’T stop!” no matter what Ian tried. So that was amusing and very much reminded me of Navarre. I do think Asher is more likely to stop for me though, but I hadn’t asked him to stop around sheep yet as I wasn’t sure he was ready for that. Ian says that he is, no problem with enthusiasm, interest and taking pressure – Asher really likes his sheep now. So that’s our homework, Ian was just having Asher stop in a stand since he pretty much flatly refused to lie down and required a LOT of convincing to even stop in a stand. We shall see what he does for me – he wasn’t doing a very good job balancing and was splitting sheep and kind of being a dork for Ian. He was doing much better the last time I worked him, so I’ll be curious when I do if he remembers or needs to relearn again. Oh, and Asher has discovered the excitement of going to Scio now, he is now running at sheep behind fences and tried to refuse to go back into his crate afterwards, which he never does. It’s cute. You know, for now.

As for Navarre, he looked great! I’m hoping that bodes well for his third attempt at Pro-Novice this weekend. But he’s just a different dog these days, he’s actually listening and just seems so much less frantic and arguing. And he figured out to come through the sheep to shed. Apparently he’s been thinking about that since the clinic a couple weeks ago, now he thinks it’s fun. Not perfect, but he looked good – I hope he shows what he can do in the trial this weekend, and surely he won’t get bad sheep TWICE in a row …

And Haku and I worked on shedding, where I kept moving backwards and knew I shouldn’t move backwards and did it anyway. Haku did pretty good though, he seemed to remember his work from the clinic and we worked on shedding and holding, which he hasn’t done much of. He did great and had a wonderful time. It helps that we’ll never actually shed anything ‘for real’, so it’s easy to say how awesome he is. Love that boy so much.

We saw Dave as well this week, it had been quite a while, maybe a couple months? I also had Dave work Asher, and Asher was fine with that as well, but he definitely seems to tune them out more. Both Dave and Ian were unable to get him to stop and said we should work on it, but at his age he’s doing everything he should be at this point.  So we did head over to Heidi’s over the weekend to see what we could do in the world of stopping. I also brought a rake to try to keep him off the sheep a bit more and help with the whole stopping thing. I was super pleased that when the babydolls just shot off in three directions Asher didn’t just chase them willy nilly, but really went out and stopped them. Which didn’t help because he would go out and turn one, then leave that one to go out and stop another one, leaving them all scattered, but the idea was there. The babydolls are not good at flocking, and when one ran ALL the way down to the end of the field we had to go convince him to go back to his brothers, and he was trying to headbutt Asher, who was curious about that, but not intimidated – so that was good to see. Anyway, once we got them all together he is doing better at things, though he could care less about the rake, really no different reaction to that than the stick, he will, eventually, move away from it. I COULD stop him, though there was no lying down whatsoever and certainly not his idea. But, hey, we did our homework and Asher thought it was really fun – love that boy.

As for Navarre, he had a rough weekend. First Dave worked with him and it was super confusing. They were using some of Ian’s sheep, actually, including one big sheep that didn’t stay with the others, who Navarre was trying to cover while the other little shetlands ran away. Which was fine, but they ran into the wandering herd of goats, and then Dave is saying he wanted these sheep, but not the goats, but yes that sheep that keeps running off and using whistles that were opposite of Ian’s and, well, Navarre eventually just sat there and said, “I’m not moving, figure your shit out and then call me.” Poor guy, just kind of blew his mind, and I think because he’s actually TRYING these days. He wanted to be right, but he just didn’t know how.

Then the trial was huge shitshow where I went to hand Navarre off to Ian and Navarre jumps up and nails him right in the nuts – and Ian was down for like five minutes. Needless to say, things did not go well after that. So I feel terrible for Ian and I feel terrible for Navarre. Sigh. Just not a good weekend for Navarre (well, or for Ian). He did double his score from the last time, but someday maybe he will trial without crazy shit happening. But then, it is herding, that just seems to be the way of it.